A Feminist Poststructuralist View on Student Bodies in Physical Education: Sites of Compliance, Resistance, and Transformation

The study of the social construction of the body has become crucial to contemporary academic discourses in education and physical education. Employing feminist poststructuralist theory and a qualitative ethnographic design, this study investigated how high school students identified themselves with images of bodies drawn from fitness and sports magazines, and how their body narratives were linked to their participation in physical education. Students' body narratives reflected notions of comfortable, bad, and borderland bodies that influenced students' physical activity choices and engagement in physical education. Girls' narratives of their physicality were found to be significantly less comfortable than boys'. Critical pedagogy to destabilize gendered dominant discourses of mass media body culture and to develop positive, meaningful, and empowering student physicality is discussed.

Recently, national studies have reported on young people's low level of participation in physical activity. Because gender and racial differences among youth participating in physical activity have not been sufficiently addressed, examining the social construction of the body in physical...

The article discusses the attitudes of the adolescents towards sports obtained from a questionnaire survey of 2,893 students in the seventh, ninth, and eleventh grades of general education schools in Moscow, Russia. The data presented by the Center of Sociology of Education of the Russian...

The purpose of this study was to analyze the motivational profiles of satisfaction with and importance of physical education in high school students and its relation with gender and the practice of sport. The sample comprised 2002 students aged from 12 to 19 who completed the Sport Motivation...

There is little question that New Zealand children and young people currently reside in a context where healthy eating and exercise imperatives are proliferating both in their formal school environments and in their lives outside the school gates. This paper draws on results of a health...

Objectives: We examined the reflection of sport awareness on body composition in the students at the School of Physical Education and Sports by determining the changes in body fat ratios over a period of four years. Study Design: A total of 42 students (20 boys and 22 girls) from the School of...

Discusses the school violence at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Explanation on the possible causes of the violence; Details on the dark turn of youthful creativity; Effects of media's coverage on earlier mass killings of children.

the aim of the study was to know de motivational profiles in students of physical education analyzing the 2x2 achievement goals and the different perceptions of the motivational climate according these profiles, and the differences by gender. Using the Achievement Goals theory (Nicholls, 1989)...

Two types of social goals associated with students' academic performance have received attention from researchers. One is the social responsibility goal and the other is the social relationship goal. While several scales have been validated for measuring social relationship and social...

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses an article on the relationship among body size discrepancy, self-efficacy, test anxiety and high school achievement, "Motivation Toward Physical Education Over One School Year," by Zan Gao, Amelia M. Lee and Melinda A....